Bitbucket Server 5.2: compliance meets DevOps

Version control is at the heart of every development team’s process. The version control tooling and technology you select not only dictate how you interact with your team but can also hold you back from making improvements to your workflow. For example, teams looking to adopt DevOps practices can be especially frustrated with the lack of tooling options if they are also facing organization compliance requirements (e.g. audit trails, mandated workflows, and permission structures). To comply you may get stuck using older homegrown solutions or must continue following inefficient development patterns.

Bitbucket Server & Data Center bring the best of both worlds – Git repository management focused on speed, collaboration, and quality with the security, traceability, and scale required to fulfill meaty compliance rules. Today we’re introducing project level administration, an additional tool for ensuring compliance regulations can be met without the burden of constant monitoring by administrators.

Keep reading to learn more about project level administration and an update to Bitbucket Data Center smart mirroring in 5.2.

Project level administration

Bitbucket Server is built for professional software teams, providing more ways to customize and secure your workflows than other Git management tools. For any repository, administrators can configure the branching model, the type of merge strategy used for pull requests, mandate that all commits be GPG signed and/or pushed only by the commit author, restrict branch access, and more. All these factors help ensure compliance requirements are met without the team having to worry about it.

Until today things like hooks, branch permissions and model, and pull request merge checks had to be configured each time a new repository was created. In organizations with teams that create hundreds or thousands of repositories, this leads to wasted time or security holes by granting repository admin access to folks who originally may not have needed it. With the introduction of project level administration, these settings can now be applied to all the repositories in a project at once.

Project level administration works in much of the same way that repository settings do. Any user who’s been granted project level administration rights can edit the settings for the project, which will apply to all the repositories stored within. New repositories created will instantly inherit settings from the project level. However, if a repository has unique requirements, the repo administrator can modify specific settings by overriding the project level configuration. For more information on project level administration, see our release notes.

Smart mirror push proxy

Smart mirrors in Bitbucket Data Center help global teams speed up pull operations in high-latency and low-bandwidth environments. These read-only copies of repositories stay updated automatically and inherit all the rules and permissions configured on the master server. Previously, continuous integration servers and developers using mirrors needed to maintain 2 URLs, one for fetching from the mirror and the other for pushing to the primary server. In Bitbucket Data Center 5.2, we’re introducing push proxying, which combines both operations into a single HTTP or SSH URL – one less thing to worry about in your day to day development activities.

Compliance meets DevOps

Adopting DevOps practices while maintaining a secure, traceable, and scalable development environment is possible. The tooling you select shouldn’t hold you back from making positive changes, it should enable them. Bitbucket Server 5.2 can help your team take advantage of the best DevOps has to offer while complying with organizational policies. Create a workflow that works for your team minus the auditing and compliance headaches. It’s a win-win all around.